METABOLIC SKIES

Patricia Olynyk is an artist, writer, and educator whose work explores science and technology-related themes and the ways in which social systems and institutional structures shape our understanding of the world. In 2007, she was appointed inaugural director of the unified Graduate School of Art and Florence and Frank Bush Professor of Art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University. She is Producer of the Creative Disturbance Podcast Series, Emergent Habitability, a program that explores the dynamic entanglement of humans, technologies, and cultural systems.

Olynyk also co-chairs the Leonardo NY LASER Talks program in New York with Ellen K. Levy. Her work has been featured in exhibitions and museums internationally, including the Los Angeles Biennial, The Brooklyn Museum, Venice Design 2018 at Palazzo Michiel dalle Colonne, the Saitama Modern Art Museum, Ars Electronica, Linz, Vienna Art Week, and the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. Her writing is included in Public Journal (York University), The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture (Routledge Press), Technoetic Arts (Intellect Press), Leonardo Journal (MIT Press), the Angewandte Book Series (DeGruyter), Bio/Matter/Techno Synthetics (Actar Press), and Visions of Scale (Bloomsbury).

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Intermedia artist Meredith Tromble makes installations, drawings, performances, and videos shown nationally and internationally, including at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, Davis, Pratt Manhattan Gallery, and National Academy of Art and Design Gallery, Dublin, Ireland. Her artworks investigate imagination and knowledge systems, including science and education, often through interdisciplinary collaboration. She has also published extensively on her own work and the work of others articulating these themes, including her recent publications The New College Circle: The Lifelong Impact of a Creative School (Red Geranium Press, 2026), and Visions of Scale: Contemporary Art and the Technoscientific Universe (Bloomsbury, 2026).

Hannah Star Rogers is an Assistant Professor at the University of Copenhagen’s Medical Museion in the Department of Public Health. Rogers is an Art, Science, and Technology Studies scholar and art-science curator. She holds a PhD from Cornell University in Science and Technology Studies and an MFA from Columbia University. She is the author of Art, Science and the Politics of Knowledge (MIT Press), lead editor of the Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies, and What Curators Know: Art and Science in the Museum (Bloomsbury). Rogers works as a curator for art and science exhibits including  “Emerge: Artists and Scientists Redesign the Future” at Arizona State University, “Shadows and Ashes: The Perils of Nuclear Weapons” at Cornell University, and “Art’s Work in the Age of Biotechnology: Shaping Our Genetic Futures” at North Carolina State University and the University of Pittsburgh. Her exhibition “Making Science Visible: The Photography of Berenice Abbott,” received an exhibits prize from the British Society for the History of Science and resulted in an invited lecture at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Rogers actively publishes arts criticism and poetry.

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Carl Craver is the Clark Way Harrison Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology at Washington University in St. Louis. His interests lie in the history and philosophy of biology, general philosophy of science, metaphysics, and moral psychology. His latest work is focused on the philosophy of memory. Craver’s new book, Living without Memory (with Shayna Rosenbaum, forthcoming, Oxford University Press) explores the contributions episodic memory makes to our lives as persons by looking at the lives of people with amnesia.

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CURATING IMMERSIVE WORLDS: AI VISIONS, SPATIAL NARRATIVE, AND SPECULATIVE MEDIA ARCHITECTURES

A rethinking of the New Media Architectures (NMA) conceptual framework emerges as media arts research and technology continue to evolve through a series of curatorial investigations situated at the intersection of art, design, education, and immersive virtual environments (IVE) research. This presentation explores a journey through the language of experimental media design practices and speculative spatial systems that examine the future of artistic production, technological and sensory culture, and interdisciplinary research.

The presentation frames an Art, Architecture, and Media Arts & Sciences research practice grounded in immersive design-engineered environments, computational worldmaking practices, and augmented media curatorial experiments. A range of creative research collaborations will be discussed, from investigations developed through the AlloSphere Research Facility to exhibition and community engagement initiatives presented through ACM SIGGRAPH conferences. The presentation will also reflect on a continuing series of online dialogues initiated at the beginning of the pandemic that explored AI, architecture, emerging media cultures, and science, organized in collaboration with Digital Futures.

Gustavo Alfonso Rincon, Ph.D., is educated as an architect, artist, curator, and media arts & design-engineering research scholar. He is an advocate for education and research as a human right. His academic and creative work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, while his professional practice has served clients across the globe.

His dissertation, Shaping Space as Information: A Conceptual Framework for New Media Architectures, investigates the limits and possibilities of immersive virtual environments (IVEs) for real-time arts–science research and creative practice. As a curator, educator, and research practitioner, Rincon continues to develop experimental media exhibitions with the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community (DAC), alongside online programming initiatives supporting Digital Futures International.

Rincon is affiliated with the Media Arts and Technology Program, where he contributes to curatorial and research initiatives in collaboration with Dr. JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, the inventor of the AlloSphere Research Facility, which is housed inside the CNSI at UCSB.

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JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, PhD, Director and Chief Scientist of the AlloSphere Research Facility and Distinguished Professor of Media Arts and Technology and Music (Composition), in the California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Also is the Founding Director of the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology at UCSB.

Kuchera-Morin’s research focuses on composition,creative computational systems, content, and facilities design. Her 35 years of experience in digital media research led to the creation of a multi-million dollar sponsored research program for the University of California—the Digital Media Innovation Program. She was Chief Scientist of the Program from 1998 to 2003. The culmination of her creativity and research is the AlloSphere, a 30-foot diameter, 3-story high metal cylinder inside an echo-free cube, designed for immersive/interactive scientific/artistic investigation of multi-dimensional data sets.

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Kon Hyong Kim, PhD, is a researcher and media artist specializing in immersive virtual environments and projection-based virtual reality systems. His work focuses on developing and optimizing highly immersive VR experiences, blending cutting-edge technology with interactive design to push the boundaries of how humans engage with digital environments.

His research contributed to a range of topics such as large-scale immersive displays, real-time interactive systems, and neurological spatial perception. His scholarly work reflects a deep engagement with both the technical and experiential aspects of virtual reality. He helped engineer the AlloSphere, one of the most prominent VR facilities in the world, and developed various multimedia software systems such as allolib.

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Joshua Dickinson is a programmer and computational artist interested in blurring the boundary between humans and machines. He received a BA in music composition from Columbia University in 2010 and an MS in Multimedia Engineering from the Media Art and Technology department at UC Santa Barbara in 2013. His research centers around human-computer interaction, cultural analytics, computer vision, and the exploration of large or otherwise unique datasets. He enjoys trying to digitally quantify and simulate things we normally consider very “organic,” hopefully as a way of getting closer to what actually makes us human.

In 2012 he founded Unfiltered Audio, a company that has released dozens of instruments and effects used throughout the music industry. In 2023 he founded SoundLabs.ai, dedicated to pushing the boundaries of human creativity through novel generative AI algorithms. SoundLabs has formed a research-partnership with Universal Music, with which they created a Spanish language AI recreation of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” by Brenda Lee, a first in the industry and featured in Rolling Stone Magazine.

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VISUALIZING DURATION: A QUANTUM PERSPECTIVE

This presentation offers an artist’s perspective on the fascinating interplay between science and fine art, particularly exploring the roles of duration, observer, chance, and uncertainty. Throughout the 20th century, radical experimental artists have challenged the fundamental questions brought to the surface by quantum mechanics, highlighting the invisible forces at play. Here, the observer is integral to quantum physics, becoming part of what is observed, shaping the visualisations of the elusive quantum phenomena.

Drawing examples of two artists, Thomas Wilfred, and Takis from the David Bermant Foundation, and artwork from Dr. Paul Thomas’ own practice, he will discuss the concepts of duration from a quantum perspective in connection to related visualising phenomena. The artworks create visual sensations and expressions of the immense complexity of visualising the invisible, ineffable, and intangible.

Dr. Paul Thomas, Honorary Professor at UNSW Art and Design and founder of the Studio for Transdisciplinary Art Research as well as the founder and series-chair of the Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference series 2010-2022. In 2000 he instigated and was the founding Director of the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth 2002, 2004 and 2007. As an artist he is a pioneer of transdisciplinary art practice. His practice led research takes not only inspiration from nanoscience and quantum theory, but actually operates there.

Thomas’s internationally exhibited research projects have been based on working with scientists inquiring into specific areas of physics. The current creative practice ‘Quantum Chaos’ artworks in collaboration with the Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology, UNSW. Publications, Concerning the Quantum in Art (2026), Quantum Art and Uncertainty (2018), Nanoart: The Immateriality of Art (2013).

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New York based Austrian artist Kurt Hentschläger creates performative installations for both physical and virtual venues. Hentschläger’s works have characteristically been visceral and immersive, as in ZEE, FEED & more recently in FLUX, EKO, SUB and SOL, and are known for their perceptual effects. They challenge an audience psychologically but also offer a meditative respite from the many stresses of today’s life. His representational body of work, like EVER MORE, ORT & MEASURE, suggests a semi-synthetic form of nature, in the Anthropocene. Hentschläger’s work practice embraces experiment and interdisciplinary approach, most prominently displayed in his ephemeral audiovisual environments and live shows in between fine arts, music and theater.

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ANDREA RASSELL is a filmmaker, media artist and creative researcher in science art. She creates documentaries and moving image installations that explore technological mediation and the multisensory perception of the sub-molecular realm. Her work has been shown at the New York Imagine Science Festival, Oaxaca FilmFest in Mexico, the New Zealand International Film Festival, White Night in Australia and Sónar+D in Spain. Andrea was the 2019 recipient of the Australian Network for Art and Technology’s Synapse residency. She has been a Research Fellow at SymbioticA, University of Western Australia and a Creative and Performance Leadership Fellow at the Curtin HIVE (Hub for Immersive Visualisation and eResearch).

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BILL SEAMAN is a media artist and a computational media researcher. He is pioneer in the field of interactive media. In particular, his PhD (1999) explored emergent meaning production in a specific generative virtual environment. This research focused on new forms of highly complex interactive generative computation and related articulated visualization. He began collaborating from the mid 1980s with media computer scientists / programmers, articulating new experimental forms of interactive media production. He has collaborated on a number of Art/Science publications and projects. In 2021 Seaman was awarded a lifetime achievement award from ACM SIGGRAPH for his pioneering work in “Recombinant Poetics / Recombinant Informatics / Neosentience.”

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Directed by: Mimi Garrard
Music: Jose Halac
Dancer: Cynthia Koppe
Costume: Mindy Nelson